we record ourselves (2016). A single screen dance film and 22-monitor screen dance installation created with dance artists Simon Ellis, Natalia Barua and Owa Barua.
Katrina was commissioned to make this work and by Threshold arts, Perth as part of a residency at the Margaret Morris Archive. It’s creation was also supported by Creative Scotland and University of Coventry.
we record ourselves has since been screened at the CCA Glasgow and Light Moves Festival of Screen Dance in Ireland, and won the competition to be re-worked for the 10-meter high MediaWall at Bath Spa University as part of theJournal of Media Practice and MeCCSA Practice Network Annual Symposium in June 2017.
A performance installation by Natalia Barua, Simon Ellis and Katrina McPherson.
During a 2 week residency in Edinburgh and Glasgow in March 2018, we explored ideas that feel important to us as artists working with performance, cameras and screens. Through discussion and creative exploration, we engaged with ideas of agency, embodied camera and the female gaze, we read Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf and listened to a talk by Jill Soloway, we looked out at a snow bound city and experimented with projectors. All this contributed to a presentation of the work in progress at The Work Room in early March 2018, which we introduced with the following text:
Humans upload nearly 300,000 photos to the internet every minute. The scale of our immersion in visual culture – the ways in which images act on us, and shape our thinking and habits – is impossible to comprehend. With each image, the ways we see and are seen are changed. Gaze is a project that explores the work of images in shaping our lives, our thoughts, our politics and our autonomy.
We are Katrina McPherson, Natalia Barua and Simon Ellis, three cis-gendered dance artists working through performance, installation and film. We have just completed two weeks of research and development in Edinburgh and Glasgow supported by Creative Scotland and The Work Room. The project was initiated by Katrina McPherson to explore perceptions of memory, archival practices, the relationship between what is remembered and what is documented and the presence of screens in dance and in life. As our practices and conversations evolved during the fortnight we started to focus on ideas, questions and reading to do with:
- privilege: who is seen by whom and how?
- the ways in which power is present and absent in front of and behind cameras
- the male and the female gaze
- the primacy and power of images in our visual culture and the currency of the live body
Supported by The Work Room, Creative Scotland and C-Dare (Centre for Dance Research) at Coventry University.
Pace was choreographed and performed by Marisa Zanotti, directed by Katrina McPherson, with a specially composed soundtrack by Philip Jeck. Pace was commissioned in 1995 for the BBC/Arts Council of Great Britain’s prestigious Dance for the Camera series and was broadcast on BBC2. Pace has subsequently had numerous international festival screenings including at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, IMZ Dance Screen and Rotation ’03 in Helsinki, Finland.
In February 2015, Pace was curated by John Akomfrah to be part of the History is Now exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London.
Moment was awarded Best Screen Choreography award at the IMZ Dance Screen Festival in Monaco, with screenings at many festivals, curated programmes and on broadcast TV across the world, including at Moving Pictures, Canada, Mostra Video Danza, Barcelona, and Rotation ’03 in Helsinki, Finland.
There is a Place (2010) Made in collaboration with Chinese Tibetan dancer/choreographer Sang Jijia and Simon Fildes, with a soundtrack by Philip Jeck, this short film was funded by Creative Scotland, Dance House Glasgow and CCDC, Hong Kong. The film won Jury Prize for Best Screendance at San Francisco Dance Film Festival in 2011, with many international screenings including in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Utah & Buenos Aires.
Goat Media now has the distribution rights for The Time It Takes and so the link here takes you to their Vimeo page, where the work is available as pay-per-view.
In 2011, Katrina received individual artist funding from Creative Scotland to make this single screen work, which she filmed on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, working with dance artists Rosalind Masson, Simon Ellis and Dai Jian. Co-directed by Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes, and with a soundtrack by James Weaver and David Lintern, The Time It Takes has had over 40 international festival screenings including in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal, Tokyo & Stockholm.
Goat Media now has the distribution rights for The Time It Takes and so the link here takes you to their vimeo page, where the work is available as pay-per-view.
A documentary featuring the renowned improvising dance artist Kirstie Simson. Over five years, Katrina McPherson filmed Kirstie Simson performing and teaching across Europe, culminating in a one-off performance with Michael Schumacher, Kenzo Kusuda and Dai Jian at the Universal Hall in July 2010. Force of Nature combines specially filmed performance, documentary footage and in-depth interviews with Kirstie, in which she talks about her life-long practice, and her passionate belief in the power of dance to bring people together and transform lives.
Kirstie Simson has been a continuous explosion in the contemporary dance scene, bringing audiences into contact with the vitality of pure creation in moment after moment of virtuoso improvisation. She is an award-winning dancer and teacher who has "immeasurably enriched and expanded the boundaries of New Dance". according to Time Out Magazine, London.
Commissioned for the Arts Council England's 'Capture' series in 2001, Sense-8 was a collaboration with Touchdown Dance, working with sighted and visually impaired dancers in the Contact Improvisation form. The Dance Director was Katy Dymoke and the Screen Director was Katrina McPherson.
Goat Media now has the distribution rights for The Time It Takes and so the link here takes you to their Vimeo page, where the work is available as pay-per-view.
Coire Ruadh (2015). Co-directed by Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes, this screendance work was filmed by Katrina in the Cairngorm Mountains, working with dance artists Frank McConnell, Ruth Jensen and Robbie Synge.
The single screen version of Coire Ruadh has been presented at over 20 international festivals including the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, USA, Danca em Foco in Brazil, Videodanza in Argentina and Light Moves Festival in Ireland.
Goat Media now holds the distribution rights for Coire Ruadh. The link here takes you to their vimeo page, where the work is available as pay-per-view.
Uath Lochans (2014) Co-directed by Katrina McPherson and Simon Fildes, and featuring dance artists Marc Brew, this screendance work was filmed by Katrina in the foothills of the Cairngorm Mountains.
Uath Lochans has been presented at has been screened at more than 35 dance film festivals world-wide including in Ireland, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, USA, UK, India, Spain and Sweden.
Goat Media now holds the distribution rights for Uath Lochans. The link here takes you to their vimeo page, where the work is available as pay-per-view.
This short film was made in collaboration with choreographer Harold Rheaume during a two week residency with Le Groupe de la Place Royale in Ottawa, Canada. We had been invited to explore the creative possibilities of dance for the screen by Le Groupe's dynamic director, Peter Boneham. It was an exciting opportunity its for us as young artists, to work with the dancers of Le Groupe, as well as a cameraperson, and to film on location (in an old prison which hd been converted into a Youth Hostel). Harold and I then went on to collaborate on Pictureshow, a live screen dance performance work which we made in 1997.
Fragments II is a video dance work by Katrina McPherson, made in 1991 whilst she was a student on the post-graduate Electronic Imaging course at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Arts in Dundee, Scotland.
Fragments II was made with Randomoptic Pick Up Company which Katrina co-founded with Vanessa Smith and Karen Grant, fellow graduates of the Laban Centre, London.
A compelling portrait of how we are: demanding; fragile;playful... There is something we should all know and understand about each other.
Choreography/direction: Janice Parker
Camera/direction: Katrina McPherson
Performers: Chris Murray, Robin Pritchard, Nenny Rollo, Adrian Ross, James Scott; Janice Parket, Karen Anderson
Video Assistant: Eveline Nicolette
Editor: Simon Fildes
Soundtrack: John Cobban
Production Co-ordinator: Joanna van den Berg for Lung Ha’s Theatre Company.
There’s Something You Should Know is the outcome of a year-long performance and video project which explored ways of enabling people with a learning disability to work with drama, dance and video specialists to create individual and collective art works.
There’s Something You Should Know was a collaboration with dance-artists Janice Parker (Creative Scotland Award winner, 2004) and Karen Anderson of Independence (Glasgow), to engage with a group of people who have severe learning disabilities and often very limited physical movement, to create a video dance work.
Methods employed during the filming process drew on the research that I have done in previous projects into the use of improvisation as a core element of making video dance. The soundtrack was created with actuality sounds recorded whilst filming, a technique that we have developed together over a number of screen-based works. The resulting 6-minute single screen work combines the formal aesthetics of non-narrative video dance, whilst at the same time foregrounding performers who would otherwise not be seen within the public domain. There’s Something You Should Know has been recognized as an innovative and challenging example of its genre and has been selected for screening as part of a number of high-profile international curated screen dance and video art programmes.
International screenings: Traverse Theatre as part of In Transit, a Scottish Arts Council study-day on Arts and Disabilities (21/06/05) and as part of curated programmes: at the Rotation 2005 Festival at the Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, Finland (18/10/05); New Territories Festival at Tramway, Glasgow (8-12/02/06) as part of the CRATE ‘Captured: Performance to Camera’ programme (curators: Lei Cox and Pernille Spence) also at Threshold Space, Perth, Scotland (27/10/06); at the Opensource: (videodance) conference (18/06/06); the Ultima Film - Dance for the Camera Festival in Oslo, Norway (01/10/ 2006) and the Video Danza Festival International Festival de Buenos Aires, Argentina, (28/11/2006); Reelmoves Dance on Screen Festival, Sydney, Australia, (16/05/2008), as part of international artists screening; Dance Camera West ‘Screendance: a new visual language’ programme, Los Angeles, USA, (5 & 6/06/2008), ‘Screendance: State of the Art’ Festival, as part of the American Dance Festival, North Carolina, USA.
